The Temptation of Nature's Girl
by LoveShotEyes
Summary: A fairy tale that blends together the story of The Bloody Chamber with The Erl King.
1. Chapter 1

_You were a sign of death, my sweet, a sign of sex and death, and you mastered both of them with the same hands. Those hands that beckoned me to you through the expanse of my innocence, the hands that took my virginity from me, dangled it in front of my lust-dazed eyes and let me destroy it before you while I laughed; the same hands that threw the remains on your bedroom floor then took me upon their jagged pieces to celebrate the occasion._

You didn't just epitomise lust – you were lust. Every fibre that stretched through you was carved by it, rooted in it, breathed it. It was like you knew nothing but that and how to tempt women into it, how to pull the bed sheets from over their eyes and draw them from their over-sized, virginal beds to you. I've seen the girls that lived in your wake and how every thought is replaced by one desire in their minds, how prostitutes have been born in that forest from the very womb of your eyes.

You were the most powerful one of them all, my king, because you tapped into their primal urges, undressed their human nature and exposed them for who they really were: sexual savages that howled to be cured. And you cured them. You cured them several hundred times then healed them all forever with death, claiming it was the only way to put such wolves to rest.

You ruled them all with simply one sigh you were so powerful. You were the greatest creature to ever live. You were a sign of death and sex, my Lord.

But now you're dead.


	2. Chapter 2

From outside, the Forest Desiree looks normal. It's merely a stretch of trees reaching for infinity, their greenery poking potholes in the clouds. Their expanse is only broken by a thin path winding into the beginning of their reign, like an invitation, a beckoning to curiosity, and the roses that sit just beyond its greeting only add to the intrigue by the way they flourish in the shadows that groom them.

Many girls have stood at the entrance, tempting temptation with their presence and admiring the scent of the flowers. But few have taken one. Although each petal drips beauty like dew, everyone knows that these are his property and, unless you have something to give in return, you don't take one. You never take one. You just admire.

Don't get me wrong, there are those who are bold enough to pluck such seduction from its home, and have, but they are the girls who never return. Any last sighting of them is with that rose entwined in their hair as they follow the path that winds out of view to him.

I was lured much as any other girl was lured – by curiosity. You see, my parents used tales of him as a method of keeping me away from the forest, told me of the rapes he had committed, the girls he had abducted, the corpses he kept as souvenirs. They described the screams that broke in a run from the forest at night and the way they would nip at your neck with terror. They said that all the insomniacs in the world stayed awake solely from the horror of hearing it only once, that the screams robbed sleep from you forever.

But, instead of acting as a warning, the stories only served to increase my interest. I wanted to see him, this destructor of girls, to find exactly what it was that made him so alluring and how he could make girls grovel in front of him, naked and so very raw. And it intrigued me that none of the villagers had seen him or touched him or loved him, yet all of them knew him. He lived in the morbidity of their thoughts, in that solitary track of ideas that was reserved for night-time and the shielded perversion it provided. I think they talked about him so much because they secretly revered him, they wanted to be him and have his power. Under the screams and the insomnia, they adored him.

And so, as a young girl of sixteen, against my parents' wishes, I entered the forest.


	3. Chapter 3

The call of the birds outside sound like echoes of those girls who have been lost before. It should be a warning but it isn't.

I just stand at the entrance with one foot precariously leaning on the verge between his world and my village and feel thrilled at the rebellion. I wonder how many girls have lingered in this exact place, neither his nor the village's but their own. And I wonder what happened to them, where they decided to hide in order to breathe his myth into existence, whether they can see us fearful, whether they laugh. And I think this place must be a test of the will. Those who stand at the entrance untempted are women, those who are tempted mere muscles of seduction.

This is my very own rite of passage and I stand upon it in broad moonlight, breathing in the scent of those roses until my lungs only move to caress the air inside them. I step inside the forest and offer myself to him, pluck a rose from the bush, entwine it in my hair and follow the path to him.

From the inside, it looks normal. There are no swollen toadstools, no faerie rings and no corpses catching the breeze from the end of a branch: it's just a forest and the absurdity of anything evil living here is too ridiculous to accept. Instead, I press on into it, admiring the richness as I do. It seems that everything inside this wooden cocoon thrives with life – not death. The flowers bloom deeper in colour and there is such a range of life it feels like Eden. Even the silence is vibrant. It coats everything in its thick nothingness, winds itself around each branch of each tree and makes everything sound empty. But, as I delve deeper into the forest, a throbbing snaps the silence into pieces, coaxes its fingers through my hair, teases my skin and I can do nothing but follow it to a clearing.

That's where I find him, waiting for me just as he had waited for them all: sat on a stump of a tree felled by man, waiting for man's daughters to fall in return. His face is carved with perfect symmetry and has eyes that own a haunting shade of hazel, which penetrate me with a deep, smiling interest. His lips are two plump lines of moss and he is as broad as sunshine with hands that swell around my frame. He loops one around my side, each finger caressing my the urge of my virginity as it travels along my back, and smiles as I shiver when his touch turns as soft and slight as water. I can feel him dripping deep inside me, stealing my will through osmosis. He liquefies every state of intensity into one pure, pulsing need.

"Come," he says.

And I do.


	4. Chapter 4

His bark strips me into bareness. His eyes drink me completely, leaving not one dreg for myself. Being with him makes me forget my virginity. It's like I've done this a hundred times before but this is the one I was always waiting for. I'm raw with anticipation and can feel the wind across my thighs, letting me know that this is just the beginning, this is foreplay and he hasn't even touched me yet. But he watches me redden and ripen, the way I breathe a little more desperately with each neglected second, the way my fists begin to clench with urgency, how my eyes beg for him to start this now before it finishes me.

It's only then that he approaches in ten steps that take ten thousand miles to reach me. His wood turns to water against me. I close my eyes and submerge myself in him. I breathe in water. I don't kick. I drown.

"You can stay with me forever, my pet, stay with me until you burst with the aching inside you, stay until it consumes you, stay until you burst and become my river."

This is what he does with all his girls. He loves them until their hearts are soaking in affection and they turn to puddles in his hands, then he weaves them through the forest as rivers and lakes that ache for the day when he will wash himself in them.

I lay my head on his chest as his fingers trace down my spine, leaving a neat row of buttercups in his wake as he does, then, with one quick rush, they vanish and he dresses me in daisies instead. And I let him. I'm tired, so tired.

Beneath his timber, I can hear a deep humming – like that of a heartbeat, but I know he has no heart. Spirits don't. Still, there's something in his words that raise a smile. I don't know why but I still murmur, "Forever", like a puppet that is yanked into dancing. If he whispered, "Die", I would die for him – and make an incredible show of my demise while doing so.

It's just a matter of time until he does.


	5. Chapter 5

I stay with him because I love him. I stay with him because I don't know any better. I stay because, even though I stand on the path that leads straight out of the forest, I don't know where home is. And I don't want to know. His knots are all over my body and I want to collect more.

He acts as though he finds my loyalty endearing but I know he expects it. This is how all the others before me have reacted to him. It's his aura. It seeps below your skin and erases all that you know is right, all that existed before him until he becomes God, father, lover and friend in one tangled twist.

You stay because there's no way you can't. He hasn't begun to consume you yet but, when he starts to, there's something so seductive about the way he does.

I watch him working every day, how he roots himself in the forest and keeps everything beating, how his breath adds greenery to the landscape and his sighs shadows to the trees. The scenery, like everything else, is dictated by his mood and he tends to and takes from everything within it.

He knows exactly when each part of his world is meant to crumble and when it's meant to be born. It's almost a miracle to simply watch him. Only I know. Those hands that give life and pleasure also deal death. I just don't know which one he's going to give me.


	6. Chapter 6

He's on top. He always is and, from this angle, I can see his timber strain with the effort of lusting. With each thrust, fresh leaves and broken bark cascade over me until I become his autumn.

Dressed in his nakedness, I'm completely unashamed. I dance beneath him, a new personality, a mutated girl, one that thrills in this attention. I've heard of his experience but now I know it. It feels like all those other girls were his blueprint and I'm the actual building. He touches with such precision and expertise that he begins adding bricks until he builds me high enough to fell in a breath of winter and a groaning of wood.

He watches me dress much like it was something he can't understand, like it's an unknown act that is never meant to occur in this Eden. He knows nothing of humanity, of modesty. He knows only lust and the primal drive to kill it.

"You will stay with me," he says and it isn't a plea nor an order. Just a fact that he tells me.

"I'll stay."

He doesn't smile. "You can have any part of the forest. You're not my prisoner but you must promise me one thing. In the west part of the forest, there's a ring of trees caged in place by overgrowth. You must not go there."

"Why?" I ask.

"That's where I keep all the bad that breeds within the forest: all the blood and beasts and nightmares. It's a haunting place that chills even me to the roots. It's not safe."

I look up at him, watching me cover myself with confusion and wonder at the advice he is giving me. This situation isn't safe, he isn't safe, and yet it would seem he's trying to protect me.

He sleeps away his exhaustion. Each breath throws a rumble across the forest. I hear it echo away into the distance as I stay awake thinking on his words. The evil parts of the forest? I thought this place was the closest to purity that I could reach. Even the leaves sound like apologies as they fall and yet he's attempting to suggest otherwise.

And it doesn't make sense that he should warn me when he is the most dangerous thing I would ever encounter. His size, his weight, his allure: he is the ultimate danger dressed as desire. There is nothing fiercer than that.

But I'm curious.


	7. Chapter 7

It's easy enough to find it. The overgrowth highlights it with its untidiness. I push it back into itself to look inside. The grass beneath it is yellow where the sun has failed to find it and, just beneath its barrier, is a trail of age-hardened footprints: small, delicate and definitely female. I'm not the only one to stray this way.

I glance back to where he's sleeping and see the rise and tumble of his leaf-sewn chest over the bushes. His steady breathing fills the forest with a breeze that smells like autumn, like dying. He's oblivious.

I don't know what will happen to me if I go in – but then I don't know where in is and that's the greatest temptation of them all.

They're all collected in a circle, facing one another and very much dead. He's carved out a hollow core of each breed of tree in the forest as frames for his artefacts: beech, oak, maple, conifer, apple. They form the perfect depiction of horror.

And they hang in the middle: pale against the colour of the bark: my fate. Each girl is beautiful, each girl is naked and each girl is hanging. Their heads loll against their chests in an imitation of sleeping while their hair dances behind them and, as the wind swings them in play, the ropes creak a lullaby from around their necks.  
I know them from my village. They are the girls who had disappeared, the temptresses. But the only thing they're tempting now is air. I approach one. Her hair is as blonde as sunrise, her cheeks pink and padded with puberty. She should have been virtuous but the nail marks on the inside of her thigh tell another tale. He had trailed along her too but she had strayed from him like she strayed from us. And she had died for it.

I take the hand of my anaemic reflection and don't shiver. Seeing this, I'm strangely determined and vengeful. I know that he did this, I know why and I know it'll happen to me and those who will follow.

He's a sign, and a collector, of death but I know what to do to break the cycle. I know exactly what has to be done.


	8. Chapter 8

He's tending to a wounded wood pigeon as I return. He hears my footsteps before he sees me but doesn't glance up. "Where have you been?" he asks.

"To the brook. To wash down," I reply. He glances back to validate this fact and this is when his expression crumbles and mine widens into a smile.

I'm completely naked and unashamed. The water from the brook is still drying on me – across my shoulders, down my stomach, along my thighs – and I can see him trying to absorb it with his eyes. For once, I've let my hair down and its chestnut waves ripple against my back in sheets of silk. I smirk like a virgin would never smirk and rest one hand against my curve before walking seductively slow towards him.

He notices every motion but doesn't know how to act. Not even when my lips are ravaging his with the energy I've learnt from him. His never respond. He doesn't know how to. He's the seducer, not the seduced, and this new role unnerves him. Still, I focus on this passion, his aching, the moment and, soon, I can hear the sap soften, the bark harden and I know I'm doing what I need to.

Pushing him to the ground, I'm sure I can feel a shiver run through him and a new rumble echoes through the forest. But I don't give him what he wants. Not yet. Instead, my hands roam the ranges of his body as soft as spring and fill every forgotten crevice with desire. I know every inch of him by the time I've finished.

Still, it's only when I climb on top of him that I know I'm completely successful. With every rock, with every drive, I feel him tighten beneath me until the bark cracks under the pressure to maintain control. But I won't let him have it.

I feed him exactly what he's fed every other girl to keep them aching. And he aches and shakes beneath me. And, as he reaches his orgasm with a tremor, his body crumbles to splinters beneath me and I fall onto the grass that was once beneath him. Rolling onto my back, I regain my breath with a smile.

He's gone. I've defeated him. We're safe.


End file.
